Unforgivable (16 page)

He reached inside his shirt and pulled out a folded sketch paper. “There’s something the sheriff doesn’t know. Something I found at Silas’s.” 

She expected to see some gruesome sketch like the photographs the sheriff had described. What she saw was even more disturbing. It was a pencil sketch of a woman kneeling at a small grave. The grave was in a patch of woods with a plant for every one of his eleven years of life. A small, flat stone sat in the middle of the plants, and…could it even be her teardrops he’d drawn on the stone?

She grabbed the paper from Gary’s hand. “It’s impossible!”

“It’s you, isn’t it?”

She couldn’t even answer him. Yes, it was her. The day Boots had died and she’d buried him behind her garden. Nobody knew about the garden, not even Ben. She figured he’d think it was silly. And her feelings and grief for her cat weren’t something she wanted to share with anyone, not even her new husband. She’d held in her feelings until he’d gone on a farm call.

Silas had been there. That was the only explanation of how he’d captured all the details, even what she’d been wearing. But how? Surely she would have heard him traipsing through the woods.

“There was more,” Gary said once she’d absorbed the sketch. “I didn’t get a chance to read much of it, but he had a journal…about you. He had your wedding day, notes about how you weren’t sure you loved Ben enough, but you owed him so much.”

Her head jerked up at that, but not a word formed in her mind. No one knew about her ambivalence.
No one.
Even though Ben always wanted them to share their feelings with each other, she never, ever shared that. “What else?” she finally asked.

“That’s all I could read. There was too much to take in.”

She looked down at the sketch again, bewildered and spooked.
Spooky Silas.

“You didn’t tell the sheriff about this?”

“I wanted to tell you myself. It’s our secret, Katie. Didn’t I tell you you could trust me? Only me?”

Before she could even form a response to that, because no way in hell did she trust him, the police siren shattered the air. Gary ran to the driver’s side of his vehicle. After a moment, a siren went silent again. He walked back toward the house, but she closed the door. She could hear his boots on the wooden steps.

“Go away!” she said, fortified by the door between them. She couldn’t face him anyway, couldn’t begin to assimilate this with him standing there gloating. 

“Katie, you know we need to talk about this.” After a moment, he said, “I’m gonna keep my eye on you. Don’t you worry about a thing. We’ll talk again.” Then he walked to his vehicle and pulled out.

She tried to catch her breath as she stared at the sketch. How could he have been there? And more eerily, how could he have been inside her heart when she and Ben were exchanging vows at the Justice of the Peace?

A knock on the front door a few minutes later sent her out of her skin. Especially since she hadn’t heard a car drive up. She wasn’t ready to deal with Gary again, or anybody. She took the gun from the drawer and walked to the front window.

What her heart really didn’t need at the moment was to see Silas’s rangy frame leaning against the column. He was wearing jeans and a black shirt. She stood at the window for a few seconds, deciding what to do. Ignore him would be the safest, all things considered, but she needed answers, answers only he could provide. She cracked open the door, somehow knowing he wouldn’t barge into her home like Gary had.

He kept his distance, remaining by the column. “You all right?”

“Not really.” She opened the door a fraction more and looked beyond Silas. He’d walked over—no vehicle. She pressed the gun against the wall next to the door. “I’m…well, I’m not in danger, if that’s what you mean.” Maybe.

He didn’t look convinced. “Who was the guy who took you to work this morning? And where’s Ben?”

“Ben’s at a conference in Atlanta for a few days. That was Harold, one of Ben’s friends.” She narrowed her eyes. “How did you know?”

“Saw you in his truck. Harold who?”

“Boyd. Why?”

He hammered out the questions, “How long has he been in town? What do you know about him?”

“He’s been here for several years now, owns One Man’s Trash, that second hand place on the corner. That’s about all I know, or want to know, about him.”

“You didn’t look very comfortable with him.”

“I’m not. He kind of gives me the creeps.”

“Any particular reason why?”

“I get the feeling he likes giving me the creeps.”

He seemed to absorb that with interest, then nodded toward the empty drive. “Gary been bothering you?”

“You set off his siren, didn’t you?”

He shrugged, reminding her of that insolent teenager she’d known so long ago. “I came over to see if you were okay and saw him in the house. You looked beyond uncomfortable, so I gave you a chance to get him out of the house.”

She wasn’t sure whether to thank him or not. It depended on his motive for sending away law enforcement. And for coming over to begin with.

“Remember what I told you about not trusting anyone,” he said. “I mean it, Katie. If you don’t feel comfortable with someone, don’t let them near you.”

How could she explain that she
had
to ride with Harold? “Silas, tell me what’s going on. The sheriff said he found stuff about girls who’d disappeared at your house…files and pictures and…sketches.”

He raised his arm against the column and leaned his face against it. “Why’d you send Gary over there, anyway?”

“I didn’t,” she said on a rush, then wondered why she was so worried about what he thought of her. “Ben saw your truck in your drive.”

“Did he know you’d been over there?”

“I wasn’t sure, so I told him just in case. I keep causing you trouble, don’t I?”

“It wasn’t your fault. Neither time was.”

He was looking at her in a way that made her feel all gooey inside. Not that appraising kind of way Gary did, or in Harold’s leering way. This was different, sensual. The way a wolf surveys one of his pack. He nodded to the swinging bench in front of the window. “Talk to me through the window.” Then he walked over and sat down.

She almost suspected he didn’t trust himself with her. In any case, it was a good idea, talking through the screen. She set the gun on the couch next to her and opened the window. He sat sideways on the bench, his profile not much more than a silhouette. He was quiet for a few moments, as though figuring out how to word what he was going to say. She took the sketch from the coffee table and ran her finger across the worn edge. She would ask him about this once she had an explanation of the missing girls.

His arm rested along the top edge of the bench, only inches from her face. He turned to her and rested his chin on his arm. “Do you think I’m some kind of murderer?”

Hey, she was supposed to be asking the questions around here. “I don’t know. Deep inside, no. But you have to admit you’ve given me nothing to base your innocence on, being mysterious about being here, being mysterious period.”

She could feel his gaze right through the screen. “Why are you even talking to me then? If you’ve got the slightest inkling that I kill women, why would you let me within two feet of you?”

She folded her hands on the top of the sofa and propped her chin on top of them, only inches from his face. “I don’t know. Maybe the deep down feeling overrides everything else, at least until I hear it from you.”

He flexed his fingers, and she heard a soft sigh escape him. “Katie, sharing doesn’t come easy to me. I’ve always been a loner, you know that. Nobody knows me, maybe including me. I’ll tell you what I can, what you’re prepared to hear now.”

“Are you going to tell me why you keep warning me not to trust anyone?”

“That’s one of those things you’re not prepared to hear yet.”

“I see. Okay, start with the pictures and stuff.”

“I told you about running off to Atlanta. I lived on the streets for a while, did odd jobs, did some things I’m not proud of, but I survived. I started writing about the things I saw on the streets and sending them to newspapers. After selling a few freelance pieces,
The Constitution
hired me full-time. I covered crimes and I wrote them better than anyone else. They liked my ability to show the crime from the victim’s viewpoint. That’s what I’m good at, expressing their feelings.”

She wanted to know what things he’d done that he wasn’t proud of, but she sensed he wouldn’t part with that, either. “So you got off the streets then?”

“Yeah, I shared an apartment with a friend who was also trying to get her life together.”

For some reason, that word—
her
—stuck Katie like a pin.

He paused for a moment, no doubt thinking of
her
. “A few years later, an editor of a publishing house saw my work and offered me a deal to cover a love triangle story in the Hamptons. They obviously liked it, because they offered me another and then another. That’s what I do, Katie. I write about murder, deception, the ultimate betrayal. I write about pain and destruction.”

“You don’t sound very happy about it.”

“It’s who I am. It’s who I’ve always been. And I make a decent living at it.”

She was so caught up in his personal story, she’d momentarily missed the connection. “So that’s why you have all those notes and pictures?” The relief was plain in her voice.

“Yes. There were two disappearances outside the Atlanta area back in 1989 and 1990. They were loosely connected because of one body being found without a shoe and the other girl’s shoe being found. There were a couple of other disappearances, too, but nothing was found. I’d become…interested in the case because of those.”

“I thought crime writers got involved once the murderer was found.”

“Not always. Sometimes we get involved if there’s evidence of a serial or spree killer. But this was dropped because nothing else happened that matched or indicated a continuation. Only I didn’t drop it. I pursued it on my own time, but found nothing. Eight years later I got involved in the case again.” Whenever he paused, she wondered if he was deciding what to tell her and what to omit. “I started investigating disappearances in small towns southeast of Atlanta, going through old microfiche and talking to law enforcement. I found a pattern that no one else found. Some cases could be linked logically, but not all of them. Because the disappearances occurred all over, and mostly in small towns, nothing was connected. I decided to follow my instincts and start a full-scale investigation.”

“The sheriff knows about the connections now.”

“I figured he did, and that he also thinks I’m the one taking the girls.”

“He does,” she answered without thinking about it. Silas’s explanation made sense, yet she knew he was holding back a lot, too. “Why didn’t you tell me you owned the house and property?”

“I told you, sharing isn’t easy for me. Even with you.”

Those last three words were weighted with some emotion she couldn’t place. He had shared some. “So, you like to be trusted, but you have trouble trusting people, is that it?”

“Something like that.” He traced a line across the screen between them with his finger, making her feel that he was somehow touching her. “You’re the reason I kept the property and house. I’ve never been anywhere that felt like home. I don’t even own an apartment in Atlanta anymore. I realized I spent more time at the office space I rented than at home, so I got rid of the apartment and made a bedroom there.”

She put her hand against the screen. “Tell me why you kept this place, Silas. Why because of me?” She held her breath and waited for his answer. 

He kept tracing that line back and forth, and he tickled her palm where her hand pressed against the screen. “You were the only good memory I had of this place. You were probably the only good thing about my life. I held you in the first moments of your life and I knew you were special. I was so touched that your mom trusted me to help her—well, truth was she probably didn’t have much choice. She’d gone into labor at the trailer and the only other person who was around ran to call the midwife. She was so scared. After you were born I helped your mom from time to time, doing things around the trailer. The kind of things a five year old can do, I suppose, but I felt like I mattered, like I was helping. Then my dad caught wind of it and went through the roof. He figured I was taking time away from him to help Ellie, so I couldn’t come anymore.

“Life sucked and the kids in town hated me and then you came to me to help you with the kitten. You were everything good and right with the world. You were pure and you were willing to fight for what was right.”

She couldn’t stand talking to him through the window anymore. She walked outside and sat down on the far side of the bench. “Tell me about my mama, Silas. Tell me about the day I was born.”

“You were all slimy and looked a bit like a prune.”

“Ew!” Their laughter faded together. She leaned closer and asked in a soft voice, “Tell me what she did. Was she happy?”

Silas had tucked his leg beneath him and sat sideways to give her room to join him. He reached over and touched her chin before letting his hand drop. “She was in total awe of you. You came fast, but she had a hard time of it. But you wouldn’t have known that when she held you, when she saw you. Even slimy and pruny, you might as well have been an angel. We both just stared at you until the midwife got there. Then she cut the umbilical cord and cleaned you up and you really did look like an angel. And as I watched you grow up, you became beautiful and smart and strong. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I didn’t lust after you. I just wanted to protect you, to keep all the world’s harm from you.”

She could see his face better now in the dim light from the house. It was his voice that touched her, the way he spoke about her. She felt everything inside her melt. If only she’d really grown up to be beautiful and smart and strong. If only Silas could have protected her from harm.

“Was my father around then?” she asked, because saying anything else was too dangerous.

“I never saw anyone around who could have been your dad. Ellie never talked about him, either. I asked once, and she said,
‘
There is no dad,’ and it screwed up how I thought things were supposed to happen for a long time.”